SUMMARY

As of 12:57 GMT / 04:57 PST we are working to resolve the following service incident:

We are investigating access issues to Help Center affecting some customers. More info shortly.

13:27 GMT / 05:27 PST:

We have confirmed reports impacting Zendesk services for some users. This incident is mostly affecting customers in US East Data center.

13:54 GMT / 05:54 PST:

Mitigation continues for customers affected mostly in US East Data center. We are working toward resolution.

14:43 GMT / 06:43 PST:

The issues with Zendesk services affecting US East Data center have been resolved.

POST-MORTEM

Starting at 12:49 UTC, some Help Centers in our East Coast data center became unavailable to customers. Investigation showed the cause as a repeated request to create new entries in a customer’s forum. This ended up mimicking the impact of a DDoS attack, although there was no malicious intent in this case.

To mitigate the issue we were able to isolate the IP address and temporarily block it in our external firewalls. Upon further investigation, after the incident was resolved, we learned that the root cause of the incident was a misconfiguration of a customer application which caused it to repeatedly make requests of the Help Center when their web portal went down. We have notified the account of the misconfiguration.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Please subscribe to this article for regular updates until the issue is resolved. If you aren't subscribed to our Twitter feed, we encourage you to do so in order to get the most current information about any service issues. We also record all site outages on our system status page where you can see the past 12 months of service uptime. If you have questions about this issue, please open a ticket with us by sending a note to support@zendesk.com.